Rescue on Fractalus!

Fantastic comments! when i played this game i always chose higher levels of play for more mountain top aliens to destroy, similar to what all have said, the fear factor in this game is just amazing, i used to travel round quite fast shooting the heck out of all things green, goose pimples from head top to toe nails and mass personal vocal prettyness from ones self, emrgency landings ,green dude anihalations, all just super exciting. used to annoy me when u landed to rescue a pilot, and a green freak on a mountain top keeps firing at you depleting your energy.....hurry up pilot! one of the best games ever. this is why my c64 collection went to the charity shop!!

Thomas - 10/12/2010

Yeah, I've remember that time,,, I was terribly sick... But on the other side it was really good to take holidays (yeah my mom took me tea and food for whole day) from school cos it's just make me try games from my Tape Cartridges what I've got with my father upgraded atari 800XE casette recorder (It was amazing when he bring it one time with yellow cord around the main on the casette recorder and said hey kids now me and my friend boost it like never ever :) Yea, we are in 21 century, but I am still playing this old games cos nothing else never exchange that feeling... and this game is shiny example of the brilliant ideas which changed me from boy to man :D yeah that alien could sent me to the wood sleeping bag I suppose.... But I've survived :) And for second time I've strong feeeeling I will go to Fractalus again......

Nostromo - 22/10/2010

I loved this game it was sooo ahead of everything else! Iv always looked for a remake with no luck...BUT today! http://www.lsdwa.com/projects/fractalus/Oh what a joy!!!!!!!!!

Gonzo - 16/01/2010

The best game ever. I can't forget the moment when the alien popped-up!. It was one of the scariest moment of my Childhood.

Macc - 18/08/2009

Add me to the fill-your-trousers brigade when the alien popped up. Will never forget it. The greatest game of my youth!

Lockett - 28/05/2008

I've played every version of this game, and none can touch the Atari original. Everything about it is perfect - the smooth motion, the limited pop-up, the intro, the varied sound effects, the colors, the atmosphere and suspense - everything. In my opinion, it's the best of the Lucasfilm fractal games.

That said, it would be great to have a remake of it.

Yungstar 06 - 09/01/2008

what can be said.... amazing, a classic.a remake/update please....

Muffy St. Bernard - 14/10/2007

I used to play "Behind Jaggi Lines" an awful lot -- dark room, volume turned up, that long pause before the pilot (?) starts knocking on the door -- but this is the first time I've really played the REAL version. Differences: pilots are scarcer, some pilots are "Aces" (what's that all about?), pilots left outside too long begin to knock slower, nice warning when you're in range of a pilot, the dot on the long range scanner is much bigger, and it seems to me that you don't actually SEE the pilots as much as you do in Jaggi Lines. The music is different (dramatic notes are held instead of repeated) and, of course, the intro.

eppy2000 - 07/10/2007

Awesome game, ahead of its time! There was also a great interview with the programmers in a 1985 issue of Computer Games magazine. They discussed the genesis of this (and Ballblazer) and George Lucas's involvement. This was the first game to utilize fractal technology for home computer. Alas, like so many Atari 8-bit breakthroughs, the news never went mainstream. Everything about the game is top notch: the gameplay, the graphics/animation, the sound effects, and the John Williams-like theme. And yes, I'm another hapless victim of the Jaggi ending my game. I knew there would be aliens in this game, but I didn't know what to expect. I had landed in a spot where the pilot wasn't visible, so I waited for the knocking sound. Instead, the thing jumped in front of the windshield. Because I had my sound on fairly loud (hooked to a boombox), I nearly got a heart attack. I was so stunned I was unable to hit the engines quickly to kill it. It took a few minutes for my body to settle down. :)

steve - 10/08/2007

Fantastic game. Realistic 3d environment great graphics and sound. The atmosphere and 'tension' created in this game was a first, im sure, in home computer games. I will never forget playing this with my friends, with the heart stopping anticipation of deciding whether the humanoid is an alien or not. Fantastic!Spectrum and amstrad could never deliver this heightened experience, it really proved what the atari 800 could do in the right hands. Classic.

Heaven/Taquart - 09/02/2007

- great gfx- great 3d gameplay- great love for details- great "battle star galactica"-like starting sequenze- great sound engine while starting- great title tune- great great great

... ps... as many players first time i have seen jaggie i was falling off my seat as i played at night...boy i was suprised...

Pengwin - 09/02/2007

This was one of my favourite games back in the 80's, and still is today. I believe this and Ballblazer were the first games from Lucasfilm Games. A fantastic debut.

Andrew Bernstein - 26/09/2006

The 1987 cartridge version represented my first exposure to Rescue On Fractalus and I couldn't have been better surprised. From the groundbreaking fractal graphics, the real time approach (day and night are represented in this simulation), the fast decision making needed (do you fry this pilot ? Is he an Alien ?) to many other aspects of the gameplay make of Rescue Of Fractalus one of the best games EVER on the Atari 8bit Platform. The best part of it ? The ATARI version is the real "deal" and is way above all conversions as it was intended and developed by Lucasfilm Games for the Atari 8bit in mind. Couldn't be better !

ZeeKat - 14/05/2006

Yeah, I was among Those, Who Almost Shat Their Pants at The Alien's Attack. Awesome.

Penge - 06/05/2006

Is was that knocking on the door bit that always got me kakking it.

Retro Kid - 13/04/2006

What an amazing game. It really did show off what the Atari 8-bits could do. The intro graphics were amazing on all the lucasfilm games (do you remember the space station thing with the ships flying out of it).But the moment that the alien popped up. Jeez, forgot your silent hills and resident evil. As a young boy staying up late to play the game, I just about had a heart attack. Even now when I play it as an adult, I still get anxious. Great.

Neopeius - 25/02/2006

Back when I was the recipient of pirated games, I received a copy of "Rescumsn" which was sort of a demo version. It didn't have a space station sequence (started right in the launch bay) and there were no hero pilots, just white humans and white/green aliens.

This was back in 1986.

Houdi - 07/08/2005

Kris is spot on with his 'fear factor' comment. I remember playing this for this first time late one night on my own. I nearly had a heart attack when that hideous Jaggi jumped up at the window of my ship. Before I'd recovered from the shock he'd smashed the window and 'Game Over'. Even after many years of playing cutting edge PC games nothing has topped that moment for sheer terror in a computer game. Also the effects of flying through the mountains in Fractalus are the best ever on an 8-bit machine. Oh, and the superior Atari version knocks spots off the C64 version.Rates alongside Star Raiders and Dropzone in my opinion.

Kr0tki - 12/05/2005

Type "AUTHOR" on level select screen to reveal credits.

kris - 28/09/2004

A fantastic game with beautiful graphics. I will primarily remember the heart-stopping fear that I felt the first time I encountered an alien in front of my ship. Quite possibly the single scariest moment ever created in a computer game of that era.

Additional Comments

"In 1982, I joined what was then the Lucasfilm Games Group (now called LucasArts Entertainment), a part of the Lucasfilm Computer Division (the Computer Division, except for Games, was later sold to Steve Jobs and was rechristened Pixar)... I was office mates with fractal wizard Loren Carpenter, the man who was largely responsible for the fractal mountains in "the Genesis Effect" in Star Trek 2. We talked about whether there might be a way to do fractals on an Atari 800... Loren thought about it, said yes, and proved it by borrowing an Atari and banging out code for the next several weeks at home.

The game was originally conceived as purely a rescue mission (hence one of its working titles, Rescue Mission), with no shooting! You were supposed to force the trailing enemy planes to crash into the mountains through sudden maneuvers. When we first showed the game to George Lucas in the summer of 1983, he liked the flying around a lot, but said, "Where's the fire button?" I told him there wasn't one... that we were trying to make a game that was non-violent. He thought it would be a lot better with a fire button, so we put one in, added mountain top gun emplacements and flying saucers. The Jaggi monster that jumps up and pounds on the windshield also came out of an idea of George's. He wanted to see the pilots running towards you, and he wanted tension... he suggested that maybe the pilots weren't always what they seemed...

The name "Jaggi" came from the Computer Division's attempts at a new graphic technology called anti-aliasing... it smoothed out the jagged stair steps of computer graphics through the use of extra colors along the edges of lines. They made jaggie lines their enemy, so we decided to do the same! There was no way we could remove the jaggies from our images... there weren't enough colors available on the Atari 800, so we used Jaggi for the name of the monster. And since there were very jagged window struts that you looked out of in the game's cockpit, we figured we'd created a very funny/clever pun when we named the game, Behind Jaggi Lines. But Atari marketing didn't like that (guess they didn't get the joke) so the game became Rescue on Fractalus!"

"Neither I nor anyone at Lucasfilm ever published anything, as far as I can
remember. I did the one for Rescue on Fractalus and the folks at LFL adapted it for
Eidolon and Koronis Rift later. Ballblazer doesn't use any fractal code.

The algorithm is the simplest possible midpoint subdivision, subject to
the constraint that the landscape be consistent from frame to frame.
The random displacement is derived from 2 bits (sign & overflow) of the
8-bit sum of the tags on the ends of an edge.

The landscape is a 16x16 mesh of edges, repeating forever over the plane.

There is a lot more detail, especially about perspective, but I'm not sure
LFL wants me talking about it yet."

Note from Atarimania: Further explanation of the math behind can be found in Carpenter's paper .

Disk

Instructions

Videos

Article

Lucas / Atarifrom Electronic Games (September 1984)

Easter Eggs

Typing AUTHOR on the title screen reveals credits!

Article

Lucasfilms

Book / Magazine Reviews

Atari User · July, 1988

The Earth forces are at war with the evil Jaggies who have seized control of Fractalus, the most inhospitable planet this side of the Kalamar system. Up in space, the brave Ethercorp pilots have been holding their own, but down on the planet's surface things are looking a little desperate.
The Jaggies have built defensive gun emplacements all over the craggy mountain tops and canyons and... [more]